In various electronic signal applications, e.g., communications, mobile phones, mobile data, RADAR, LADAR, electronic jamming, and/or any other civilian or military electronic signal application, it is often desirable to transmit or detect one or more signals having a varying parameter set, e.g., frequency, pulse width, amplitude, pulse repetition rate, chirp rate. For example, in various applications, it is desirable for one or more parameters of an electronic signal system to be “agile”, i.e., variable, from pulse to pulse.
In various state of the art applications, parameter sets are determined a priori in a lookup table fashion. The operating conditions are identified and a single parameter set or a fixed sequence of parameter sets, determined a priori for the operating condition, are looked up in a database through a standard lookup table. In various other applications, pseudo-random number generators are often used to create “random” pulse-to-pulse agile waveforms. In other fields, random number generators are used to vary pulse width for power electronics. Each of these methodologies relies on fixed parameter sets or uniformly “random” parameter distributions (i.e., for each parameter, the uniformly random distribution is designed to spend uniform dwell time on each value) to vary transmitted signal properties.
However, in various applications, dwell time for some values of each parameter is preferably higher or lower than for others. For example, in some applications, it may be desirable to increase or decrease dwell time on one or more particular frequencies because the frequency is more or less useful than others, because more systems generally operate at that frequency, because conditions dictate that the frequency is more likely to be preferred, because there are a plurality of systems operating at different frequencies, because the system can transmit at a plurality of different frequencies, where some frequencies need to be used more often than others, or because the particular frequency is otherwise considered a higher or lower priority.